Pubdate: Sun, 07 Jan 2001 Source: Baltimore Sun (MD) Copyright: 2001 The Baltimore Sun, a Times Mirror Newspaper. Contact: 501 N. Calvert Street P.0. Box 1377 Baltimore, MD 21278 Fax: (410) 315-8912 Website: http://www.sunspot.net/ Forum: http://www.sunspot.net/cgi-bin/ultbb/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro Author: David L. Greene 'METH' CUTS A SWATH THROUGH THE HEARTLAND Drug Gangs, Home Labs Behind Spreading Use Of Stimulant In Neb. LEXINGTON, Neb. - Here in the heart of America's heartland, healthy corn crops, juicy steaks, amiable neighbors and winning Cornhusker football teams are the pleasures that have long kept people happy. But recently, folks here have experimented with a different pleasure. This one's illegal. Methamphetamine, a stimulant long prevalent on the East and West coasts, pushed by rogue motorcycle gangs, has become a new pastime. Take a population admired for rural innocence, mix in a powerful, available drug that breeds violence, and the results are stunning. On farms, housewives are taking the drug for extra energy to finish chores, and their marriages and families are ending up destroyed. Here in Lexington, population 9,000, gang violence is on the rise as members of Mexican cartels descend to meet the drug demand. Meth-traffickers have been arrested in tiny towns like Dannebrog, with just 320 residents. And in equally small places, police are stumbling upon makeshift labs where people have tried to combine household and agricultural chemicals - often in dangerously toxic mixtures - to manufacture methamphetamine. "It has overwhelmed us," says Glenn Kemp, an investigator with a Nebraska drug task force. "It wasn't hard to believe when Iowa got a [methamphetamine] problem. Or Kansas or Missouri. But Nebraska? South Dakota? Here's wholesomeness. Well, come to our communities. We're no different from anywhere else, even if we're less populated. Why can't we be the meth capital of the United States?" It may seem like the nation's most unlikely drug war, but authorities have an explanation for the rise of methamphetamine - which is also known as "meth," "crank" or "speed" and can be smoked, sniffed or injected. Over the past decade, low-skill meat-packing plants have sprouted in small towns, drawing an enormous Hispanic population seeking jobs. Police say their arrival has allowed drug-peddling gangs from Mexico and California to infiltrate farm towns where, a decade ago, they would have stood out. Meanwhile, recipes for homemade meth have become accessible on the Internet. An important ingredient - anhydrous ammonia - is used by farmers in irrigation and is widely available. Users can steal anhydrous ammonia from farm storage tanks, pick up other ingredients (such as cold medication and lithium batteries) at a convenience store, and cook meth for themselves. "It was curiosity that made me start," says May, a 36-year-old Nebraska native and recovering user from Lexington who asked that her last name not be used. She says she used to buy meth from a pig farmer who manufactured it himself. Friends were using meth, and May couldn't resist. "They had energy and company all the time," she says. "They were happy and always laughing." A mother of five, May quit using in January. In February, she was served with a federal indictment on charges of drug distribution. Months earlier, she had put a relative who wanted to sell meth in touch with a buyer in Lexington, not realizing her actions opened her to charges of drug distribution. She expects to escape jail time because she has cooperated with prosecutors. "I know I've taken a lot of drugs off the street," she says with an air of pride. "But [Lexington] is probably the meth capital of Nebraska. It's in the schools. It's everywhere." Meth has spread to Spalding, a Greeley County community of 582 residents in the desolate Sandhills region of central Nebraska. The welcome sign says "Spalding Has It! Business and Recreation." In October, Spalding's part-time police officer and a sheriff's deputy recovered chemicals used to make methamphetamine in a farmhouse. Excited by their discovery - and unaware that trained drug officers use bodysuits and oxygen masks when handling such materials - the officers put the chemicals in their patrol car, took them to the village hall and spread them on a table. When a special drug enforcement team reached Spalding the next day, it shut down the hall and the town's main street for 14 hours, disposed of the contaminated table, ordered the carpeting scrubbed and told the county attorney to throw away his clothing because he had been standing in the room for too long. "There are only three officers in our county," says Paul Asche, the sheriff in Greeley County, which includes Spalding. "We sometimes struggle to get the day-to-day stuff done. We don't have resources to spend manpower on drug investigations." In 1997, authorities in Nebraska uncovered two meth labs in the state. In 1999, they found 38, and they discovered 35 last year. They look at neighboring states and see how the problems can multiply. Iowa officials found 85 labs in 1997, and then 500 in 1999. In Kansas, the number of discovered labs jumped from 99 to 492 in the three-year span. The Nebraska Crime Commission reports that meth-related arrests by state drug task forces shot up by 160 percent between 1996 and 1999, from 278 to 720. County attorneys around Nebraska say they are being forced to ignore lesser offenses - such as growing marijuana - that may have brought stiff sentences and made headlines a decade ago. Crime labs across the state are struggling with a backlog of meth to examine. In 1996, Congress labeled portions of the Midwest a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), and began funneling $8 million a year to Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and the Dakotas to combat meth. But the money is spread thin. Nebraska's share, $1.1 million, has been enough to launch a successful awareness campaign and hire a handful of drug experts who crisscross the state. But many county sheriff's departments - some amount to a single sheriff - and the Nebraska State Patrol are often alone in dealing with meth. "This is a whole new drug, with a whole new type of people," says Nancy Martinez, who coordinates Nebraska's arm of HIDTA from the U.S. attorney's office in Omaha. "Most of our deputies didn't go to the FBI academy. They aren't trained. They didn't know what to do with it. They started having meth dealers, and whole drug-trafficking organizations. They're good guys, but they don't have the training." There are towns in Nebraska that have been wholly transformed by the meth problem, farm communities with streets now home to gangs, jails full of users and county attorneys flooded with drug cases. Take Lexington, a town of 9,006 people that looks like an ordinary farm community, with its grain elevator towering over a main strip of shops and businesses. It has a meat-packing plant and a growing Hispanic population and sits along Interstate 80, which has become an artery for smuggling meth across Nebraska. The sheriff's department made 102 meth-related arrests in 1999, and 67 through September of last year. But meth - which can cause fits of paranoia or violence - has been linked to other crimes, including seven homicides since 1994. Paul Schwarz, a native, became a sheriff's deputy 10 years ago but has since become one of the county's two drug investigators, out of necessity. He also assists understaffed sheriff's departments in 22 other counties - encompassing 1,200 square miles in western Nebraska. A sign on the highway still calls Lexington an "All America City in an All-America county." Schwarz remembers when it was. "This was open farm country," he says. "You drank beer going down Main Street and threw out empty beer cans. We were the rabble-rousers then." Residents of Lexington - both Hispanic and white - have been caught selling meth in bars, farm fields or the parking lot at Wal-Mart. There are now four confirmed street gangs in town, all connected with documented gangs from California, Mexico or Guatemala. Some of the Lexington groups practice initiation rituals that involve being beaten or, for women, being forced to have sex with several members. The last homicide in Lexington, in November, was gang-related - a man was stabbed outdoors along a street called Oregon Trail. Elizabeth Waterman, the county prosecutor here, says that her office is overloaded with meth cases and that she wants to hire two more lawyers. But applicants are turned off when they find out about the workload. Another problem is that in western Nebraska, District Court judges travel between rural counties and show up in Lexington every week or two. Many felony drug crimes have to be pleaded down to misdemeanors, so they don't have to go before a district judge. "In the pre-meth days, you saw investigations into things that don't seem serious now - like marijuana distribution," says Waterman. "I don't want to give the impression that it's OK. But it used to be that it was a real big deal if someone was found to be in possession of a pound of marijuana." Nebraska authorities have seen widespread meth use in high schools and are concerned it's spreading to pupils as young as 12 or 13. At Lexington High School and Lexington Middle School, counselors are planning to show a video called "Methamphetamines: The Icy Death." Throughout the state, though, meth is described as an ill that can be cured. Law enforcement authorities like to point out that, despite an apparent lack of narcotics experience, they were able to handle a milder outbreak of cocaine use in the 1980s. Randy Morehead, a criminal investigator with the Nebraska State Patrol, says he's seen small-town cops go up against drug-traffickers, and actually likes their chances. For example, Morehead recalls how it took old-fashioned policing to nab a meth-trafficker in St. Paul, Neb., (population 2,009) last year. A box containing 80 needles, tiny bags with meth residue and an envelope with a ZIP code scrawled on it was found in a field. An officer in the St. Paul Police Department traced it to a house - with help from his father, who works at the post office. "Working a small town has its advantages," says Morehead. "We just called Dad." Meth is cheaper than cocaine and creates longer highs, giving it instant appeal after surfacing in new, rural locales. In Lexington, Fernando Barranco, a substance abuse counselor, says many of his clients - a mix of Hispanic and white men and women - are employees at the meat-packing plant. They used the drug - innocently, they assumed - for energy to work extra hours and gain overtime pay. Barranco has also treated housewives on farms who heard meth was an "upper," and took it to impress demanding husbands, lose weight or stay alert to care for children. Within months, they became so dependent they were trafficking to make money to buy more, he said. While states such as Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa have been alarmed by meth being smuggled in, they are equally concerned that residents can make it at home. Various mixes of over-the-counter goods - from salt, batteries and engine starter to drain cleaner and matches - can be combined to make meth. When mixed the wrong way, these concoctions can ignite and be deadly. HIDTA offices have contacted retailers, pleading that they take note if customers are buying obvious lab ingredients. Most Wal-Mart stores now have a warning signal that alerts cashiers when a customer buys more than three boxes of Sudafed or generic pseudoephedrine, which are often used to make the drug. Bryan Whitt, manager at a Wal-Mart outside Omaha, says his security guards watch for odd combinations of items at the registers. In December, the store called police, who arrived to arrest a man who left with eight boxes of Sudafed and lithium batteries. "That," recalls Whitt, "made it obvious what he was going to do." In Grand Island - with a population of 42,000, it's one of Nebraska's larger cities - meth has been available in pockets for more than a decade. But in the past three years, it has become such a part of life that some young adults feel out of place if they're not users. "If I left jail right now, I'd go one block and I could have meth like that," says Danny Hatcher, 32, a father of four and recovering user serving time in the county jail. "Before, if you were shooting dope, you felt like a monster. Now, if you ain't shooting dope you must be a cop." Hatcher will be transferred to the state penitentiary for eight to 12 years. He has been arrested on an array of drug, assault and burglary charges. He says there were times when he wanted to stop using meth, but friends in Grand Island pressured him to continue. Some Nebraskans pretend that the meth problem isn't there. At the Coney Island Cafe, three blocks from the county jail in Grand Island, owner Gus Katrouzos prefers to talk about the five generations of children who have come for his famous hot dogs and malts than to discuss any drug problem. "Good people still ignore it," he says. "You don't talk about it. You just go to church and pray a lot." - --- MAP posted-by: Terry F